This spring, an 80-year-old Japanese chalk company went out of business. Nobody, perhaps, was as sad to see the company go as mathematicians who had become obsessed with Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, the so-called “Rolls Royce of chalk.”

We take it for granted that urinals flush. With each pull of the lever, gallons of clean water come to whisk away a few ounces of pee. If you think about it, it’s actually pretty wasteful, and the current drought is convincing facilities to consider waterless urinals. But these waterless bathroom contraptions have had…

The story of kuru, as classically told in biology textbooks, is a tragic one. The Fore population in Papua New Guinea ate the brains of their tribe members as an act of mourning, a ritual that allowed a misshapen protein to spread through the population. This caused the disease kuru, which killed as much as 10 percent…

Yeast labs have a distinctive smell—a bready scent familiar to bakers and brewers. But the frozen test tube of yeast I held at Ginkgo Bioworks had a fragrance crisp and pear-like. It was definitely yeast, but it had been genetically engineered to smell like no yeast has ever smelled.

Dinosaurs fossils, we’ve all been taught, consist of bone—their flesh, skin, and organs having decayed long ago. But a new discovery might upend that assumption: Scientists have found evidence of blood cells with the protein intact in eight fossils which were not even particularly well-preserved.

Ever since humans started building tall things, birds have been pooping on them, including high-voltage power lines. In the 1920s, Southern California power grid was beset by streams and streams of bird poop.

French scientists have created the first synthetic polymers that can store information as bits of 0s and 1s. You might think of it as a highly simplified version of DNA, another molecule that is very, very good at storing information. These new polymers could one day replace DNA in the burgeoning field of molecular…

Since 2012, the US has held the title of world’s number one wood pellet exporter. What’s the big deal with wood pellets? Well, Europe has very keen on replacing coal with more environmentally friendly wood pellets—except, well, depending on who you ask, wood may not be that great either.

Every time a virus gets you sick, your immune system keeps a record. This essentially becomes a kill list that lets your body recognize and readily dispatch of any virus that tries to invade again. Scientists have now created $25 test blood test that prints out this list—an easy and cheap way to find out every virus…

Tri Alpha Energy does not have a website. Its office in California is unmarked. But this stealth company apparently has hundreds of millions in cash. And now it has something to show for it, reports Science: The company claims it’s gotten ten times better at containing high-energy particles necessary for fusion…

The physicists who invented the nuclear bomb worked out of Los Alamos in New Mexico, but the people who did the dirty work of making the bombs were in Hanford, Washington. Throughout the Cold War, Hanford churned out plutonium for our nuclear arsenal. It was also, conveniently, a place to experiment with radiation.

It is not easy for a human to traverse the deep, cold waters of Antarctica. It is easy, however, for seals to swim through them. For the past decade, scientists have been turning elephant seals into live, swimming sensors to monitor those waters. Now, the data’s going public.

The summer after I graduated from college, I took an RA job on campus that gave me a lot of free time, but not much pay. So I did the natural thing one does at a research university: I signed up to be a guinea pig for neuroscience experiments.

Inbox, aka Google’s attempt at fixing the cesspool that is email, is no longer invite only. You can download it right now at the Apple or Google Play store. To mark the occasion, Google’s also pumped out some new features, including the super duper important “undo send.”

There is gold out there on asteroids. Silver and platinum and titanium, too. And if we’re seriously going to mine asteroids, it might be easier to tow them closer to Earth. But that could be serious trouble for satellites, according to new calculations by astrophysicists.

The U.S. Air Force’s supersecret X-37B was launched into orbit for the fourth time last week, and amateur satellite watchers have promptly identified its secret orbit—also for the fourth time. There is, you see, a small army of amateurs who keep track of over 300 spy satellites, often with little more than a pair of…